Archive for the 'Media' Category

Fear and Loathing on Newsnight

Published
by
David Herman
on September 25, 2008
in Media
. 1 Comment

One last thought about Ruth Kelly… Was she any good? I mean, everyone keeps going on about how hard-working she was as a cabinet minister, how young she was, what a great mind she has. Will Hutton could not have been more complimentary and that may not be a big deal to you, but it means a lot to me. And journalists have looked at this from every angle: Did she jump? Was she pushed? Did this push-me pull-you thing happen at 3 in the morning or at 3.30? Was it all because of David Grossman’s (from Newsnight not the Israeli novelist) brilliant scoop about the cabinet reshuffle the night before? I mean, really every angle.Was it good for Gordon? Bad for Gordon? Good for Miliband? Good for Cameron? Good for backbenchers I’d never heard of and will never hear of again (if I can help it). We’re talking lots of angles.

But no one that I heard — on Newsnight, The World at One, Channel 4 News, The Ten O’Clock News, Newsnight (again) — said whether she was any good at what she did. No one looked at British education while she was education secretary or the state of British transport. No one crunched any figures. Grade inflation? Number of teachers or headteachers retiring early? Stats on classdroom violence. Failing schools. Number of illiterate and innumerate children leaving primary school? Number of illiterate and innumerate children leaving secondary school? Number of employers stuck with kids who can’t read or write but have GCSEs worth nothing? Not a word. What about transport? How about those rail line closures we kept reading about in the summer? Those unbelievably expensive rail fares? Anything to do with the minister of transport? Is the Eurostar still going slower in Kent than in northern France? Just wondered. Terminal 5? Airlines going bust? Is that transport?

Just wondered. Curious that Jeremy Paxman, Martha Kearney and Jon Snow didn’t.

Flaming for Obama

Published
by
Mary Fitzgerald
on September 24, 2008
in Elections, Media, Science and technology and United States
. 15 Comments

America’s political battles are no longer just fought on the hustings and in the television studios; some of the fiercest take place in the blogosphere. Peter Jukes, a seasoned veteran of the Democratic primary wars, recalls the highs and lows of that internecine struggle, and looks to the battle ahead.

Strange times on Freeview

Published
by
David Herman
on September 17, 2008
in Media
. 0 Comments

Just when you thought you knew where you were with British TV things have taken a strange turn. Or several strange turns.

1) Best live sports moment of the autumn

Sky Sports News (yes, really) for its superb coverage of the last night of the football transfer window. As the poor old BBC werre still telling us that Tottenham had accepted Manchester City’s offer for Berbatov, there was Sky with live footage of Berbatov with Ferguson and Gill at Old Trafford. Helped by the craziness of Manchester City’s bid for Robinho, Sky managed to turn the football transfer saga (without a single interview with any players, managers or agents) into unmissable TV.

2) The revival of ITV drama — and a memorable arts programme

Just when we thought no one need bother watching ITV again, ITV peak-time drama has taken on a new lease of life. The three-parter ‘Children’ (Mondays at 9pm) has just finished, ‘Lost in Austen’ (Wednesdays at 9pm) is half way through and then from next Monday, Juliet Stevenson and Greg Wise will be starring in a new three-parter, ‘Place of Execution’. Before getting too excited, however, we should note that ‘Celebrating - The South Bank Show’ has been banished to ITV3 and that ‘Faith in the Frame’ on religious art was after midnight last Sunday. Shame on Fincham and Grade. You shysters. Last week’s clips of the classic programme with Francis Bacon was one of the highlights of the year.

3) More4 — really?

Who’d have thought that both the best current affairs programme and the best entertainment programme on British TV would be on More4? Yes, they are the same show as fans of ‘The Daily Show with Jon Stewart’ will already have guessed. At 8.30 on weekdays it is the classiest satire programme on TV, ridiculing TV pundits and politicos alike with superbly researched TV clips, all held together by the best TV frontman in America at the moment (that’s why he was presenting this year’s Oscars show).

4) And, of course, there’s BBC4

Christopher Nupen’s great documentary about ‘Jacqueline du Pre and the Elgar Cello Concerto’ (Friday, September 26, 7.30 pm) begins an 8-part series of Nupen’s films on BBC4 on Friday evenings. That’s what BBC 4’s for — but what, exactly, is BBC 2 for?

Hovis ad

Published
by
David Herman
on September 15, 2008
in History and Media
. 2 Comments

The new Hovis ad tells the story of modern Britain through a series of iconic images (Suffragettes, soldiers marching off to World War I, the Blitz). The idea is that Hovis has always been there, on every step of the journey.

There is one interesting twist, though. At a certain point the ad runs out of iconic images. After The Blitz and VE Day comes the youthful, multi-racial 1960s and ’70s (mini-skirts, tank tops and all), then the 1980s Miners’ Strike and then the fireworks celebrating the Millennium and, er, that’s it. In other words, no binding images that pull us together. Not the Falklands, not LiveAid, not 1997, not even the death of Diana. No landarks, no images, no moment comparable to the Big History of two World Wars and the Swinging Sixties.

Perhaps it’s a sign of Brown’s Britain.  A sense that we’ve run out of steam. All the action is elsewhere. Or perhaps the enduring images of the last twenty years are too complicated (Iraq? 7/7?). Or too sad (Diana’s death). Or elsewhere (the Fall of the Wall, 9/11). Or too divisive. So much for Cool Britannia, BritPop and all the other Brit-hype from the last ten years.

Prospect online this week

Published
by
Susha
on September 3, 2008
in Inside Prospect and Media
. 37 Comments

This week on Prospect online, historian Marko Attila Hoare argues that Russia’s intervention in Georgia and its recognition of Abkhazia’s and South Ossetia’s “independence” are not equivalent to western action over Kosovo or Iraq. Instead, Moscow’s behaviour is that of an imperial power brutally attempting to preserve and expand its sphere of control—and it must be opposed.

Also this week, Salil Tripathi explains why India is condemning its farmers to misery and impoverishing its own citizens by refusing to move on from its outdated approach to agriculture.

All hail Arianna

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on July 30, 2008
in Inside Prospect and Media
. 7 Comments

Andrew Keen told me that the one glaring omission from our list of public intellectuals was Arianna Huffington, the Greek-born socialite who is turning the US political media upside-down with her blog-cum-aggregator-cum-celebrity-gabfest the Huffington Post.

I didn’t get it. After all, while the HuffPost may have a readership extending into the millions, and while it may even represent a serious threat to the future of the newspaper industry, how does this make its proprietor—who seems to change her mind more often than John Gray—worthy of the tag intellectual?

But in his portrait of Huffington in the new issue of Prospect, Keen suggests that we may be witnessing the emergence of a new kind of intellectual, one whose influence is measured not in terms of his or her ideas, but by the quality and extent of his or her personal network. And no one has a more powerful network than Arianna. Click here to read his piece in full, and let us know your thoughts below.

Gulen, NPR and me

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on July 15, 2008
in Media and Prospect affairs
. 1 Comment

Earlier today I was interviewed about the Prospect global public intellectuals poll by Robert Siegel on All Things Considered on the US radio network NPR - to listen, click here and follow the link at the top.

Enough already with the smack, Shmu’el

Published
by
John Kelly
on June 11, 2008
in Media and Religion
. 0 Comments

There are less than 300 Jews in British prisons, and Samuel is almost certainly the only convicted (former) international drug trafficker amongst the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic Jews of Stamford Hill in north London. “The Prisoner,” episode one of Jews, a three-part BBC4 documentary which starts on Wednesday 18th June, charts Samuel’s mission to reassimilate into a community which is in many ways more challenging than his previous nine years of hard time in Brazilian, Israeli and English prisons.

“A yiddische, haddische boy, with the curls and everything, what did I know about drugs?” Samuel, 38, muses, whilst allowing that Hasidic garb is a good drug smuggling disguise only up to a point, since it led to 12 years in jail. “He’s obviously unique: there isn’t another such case” his brother explains, adding that returning to a “very disciplined lifestyle” in a closed community with strict rules, severe dress code and segregation of the sexes will be very different from prison. Samuel must wear an electronic tag for five months following release, but this is almost unnecessary: everybody knows each others’ business in an enclave where people live according to rules fashioned in 18th-century eastern European villages.

The 20,000 Stamford Hill Hasidim have rarely been documented, much less filmed, by outsiders. Televisions are not encouraged in private homes. The internet is anathema. Women must not look men in the eye, and wear wigs and hats—in case the wigs are too realistic. One pious soul spends her days sewing up slits in skirts. Children wear tights from the age of three. People sway and mutter in constant prayer, including before and after using the toilet. While forgiveness and charity are part of the community ethic, Samuel himself must now choose between his former outlaw life and religious conformity. Having lived among criminals, not to mention non-Jews, he will never recover the carefree innocence of the young people scurrying about in black hats and coats, staring at the ground.
Continue reading ‘Enough already with the smack, Shmu’el’

Luttwak, Obama, apostasy and New York Times self-hatred

Published
by
Tom Nuttall
on June 5, 2008
in In the news, Media and United States
. 1 Comment

For many, the most exciting thing about Barack Obama’s victory in the Democratic race is the prospect of a US president who will take concrete steps to improve America’s tarnished reputation in the rest of the world, particularly the Muslim world. Andrew Sullivan indulged the thought last year in his hymn of praise to Obama in the Atlantic: “It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm.”

Not so fast, said Prospect author and professional contrarian Edward Luttwak. Writing in the New York Times, Luttwak suggested that Obama’s chances of healing relations with the world’s Muslims would be crippled by his own personal history. Obama’s father was, famously, a Muslim, but renounced his faith, and Obama is a practising Christian, as we know from the Jeremiah Wright controversy. According to Muslim law, wrote Luttwak, Obama’s birth to a Muslim father, even one who had left the faith, made him an apostate. And apostasy in the eyes of Islamic clerics is the worst of crimes. The usual sentence is execution, and Islamic law states that any Muslim who kills an apostate shall be spared punishment. At the very least, said Luttwak, this would make security for the president on trips to Muslim countries even more of a headache.

Luttwak likes to ruffle feathers, and usually gets a response—his article “The middle of nowhere,” published a year ago in Prospect, which argued that the world would do best to ignore the increasingly irrelevant middle east, remains, I think, the most-read piece on our website. (The book of the same name is being published later this year.)

And Luttwak certainly got a response this time. Such a fierce one, in fact, that the NY Times conducted its own inquiry into Luttwak’s thesis, interviewing five Islamic scholars, and found, more or less, that Luttwak was talking complete bunkum. In a fine contribution to what is steadily becoming a grand tradition of self-flagellation at the Grey Lady, the newspaper’s public editor wrote: “Op-Ed writers are entitled to emphasize facts that support their arguments and minimize others that don’t. But they are not entitled to get the facts wrong or to so mangle them that they present a false picture… With a subject this charged, readers would have been far better served with more than a single, extreme point of view.

‘How TV Changed Britain’ — More Stupid TV from Channel 4

Published
by
David Herman
on June 1, 2008
in Media
. 0 Comments

‘How TV Changed Britain’ is a new 6-part series on Sunday nights on Channel 4, looking at TV genres and how they have reflected and changed Britain. A mixture of clips and 30-second soundbites from various talking heads, it attempts a kind of cultural analysis. Tonight’s (June 1) opening show was about the British police on television, from ‘The Blue Lamp’ and ‘Dixon of Dock Green’ in the 1950s to ‘Life on Mars’.

It could hardly have been more pedestrian and predictable. All the old classics were there: George Dixon and ‘Z Cars’, ‘The Sweeney’ and ‘The Bill’, GF Newman’s ‘Law and Order’ and Roger Graef’s fly on the wall series, ‘Police’, and then a breathless rush through the last twenty years (’Silent Witness’, ‘Prime Suspect’, ‘Cracker’ and ‘Inspector Morse’).

Continue reading ‘‘How TV Changed Britain’ — More Stupid TV from Channel 4′